fallout from a restless mind

#xmasongs: day one

please keep your nominations coming in (leave them in the form of comments on this post or yesterday’s launch post) – if you pick good tunes, they will be featured over the next ten days.

as for today, i’m going to kick things off with one of my favs. of all the hundreds of thousands of christmas albums produced in the US in the 50s and 60s, one voice has remained a truly lasting standard:

no, no, no. all of these cats did good work and may well feature further along our christmassy road, but for me the person who stands head and shoulders shampoo above all the christmas crooners was actually only 4′ 9″ tall (shorter even than John Cage at 4′ 33″).

so, tell us a bit about this person:

★well, they called her Little Miss Dynamite (before she got taller, turned british, turned black, got married, then divorced and became Ms Dynamite-hee)

★she had 37 US chart hits in the 60s (which puts her at number 5 on the list for that decade – after Elvis, The Beatles, Ray Charles and Connie Francis)

★this song features in one of my favourite Christmas movies ever (the utterly peerless Home Alone)

this is ...

a place designed to house thought excesses. if my mind is archimedes' bath, the water my general thoughts and archimedes himself the kind of clever thoughts i'm supposed to put in my work, then what you will find here is what escapes over the brim as the skinny boffin lowers himself into the tub. it exists, further indulging the analogy, on the basis that it might be necessary to collect and measure the runoff in order to know the volume of the person.